Posted
by
samzenpus
on Sunday October 14, 2012 @12:22PM
from the go-ahead-and-jump dept.

First time accepted submitter madcarrots writes "The Red Bull Stratos space jump is about to take place. The balloon is filling up and launch is expected around 10 AM MDT. Check out the live feed of the inflation process... it's beautiful!" After some delays it looks like the jump is finally going to happen. UPDATE: The jump was a success. Baumgartner is on the ground and apparently fine.

Aside from the obvious hair shirt trolling, you can talk to the ham radio guys who launch balloons with radio repeaters slung underneath them.

You'd superficially think the very slightly lower weight of H2 would make H2 lift more than He, but after all manner of handwaving it turns out that very cold low pressure helium displaces more air at altitude. So 100 Liters of H2 and He at STP, hauled up 100Kft, supposedly that results in a slightly higher volume of He than H2. I honestly don't care enough to research it, but urban legend or no its an entertaining story. And you're not solving it with ideal gas laws (need non-ideal gas laws/tables)

Because H2 comes from natgas and He comes from natgas the obvious next calculation is if the larger balloon outweighs (get it?) the advantage of cheaper filling.

You could probably create a whole low level undergrad or maybe AP high school science lab out of determining if the first claim is true or made up and secondly which would overall as a system be cheaper aka less damaging to the environment.

Except that medical grade helium and the crap they fill party balloons with are two different things.

No, they're the same thing subjected to different degrees of refinement. Everything from balloon helium to the highest-grade purified lab helium come from the same limited sources.

The volume of the Red Bull Stratos balloon is close to a cubic kilometre. Factoring in the practice jumps and aborted launches, I'd estimate that this project could easily be accounting for over 3% of US helium consumption this year.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask why hydrogen is not a viable alternative. There are probably some good, valid answers to that question, but I don't think that yours is one of them. And we do need a longer, louder discussion of how helium usage should be prioritized: it's neither renewable nor (in many applications) substitutable.

Things like this are good to show your kids to demonstrate what a Real American can do with guts and determination and also to show them the indomitability of the American spirit and how we don't need to take any God damn shit from the Chinks, Japs, Eurotrash etc.

If he had have died it would have additionally shown your kids that jumping off high things is very dangerous.

It is designed to cut from the balloon and land with its own parachute. Not only is there equipment in there that they need for every jump, it's his emergency return option. It wouldn't be the most comfortable landing, but it would be survivable.

My impression from the previous discussion on this was that helium shortage is a fictional crisis. Medical usages don't do helium recovery, which is where most of the loss occurs. Also the main source of helium - as a by-product of natural gas extraction - just vents most of it because its not worth capturing it. So complaining about "misuse" is nonsense. If one is really worried about a helium shortage one should be pushing for recovery in its biggest usage context and stockpiling. Neither of these are being discussed, so apparently this isn't actually serious.

I'm certified as an Enriched Air diver and you are a bit confused. It's the partial pressure of Oxygen that will kill you. The safe limit we dive to is 1.6 atm partial pressure of O2. This means that you could breath pure O2 in about 20 ft of water. Below that it's toxic.In spacesuits they breath pure O2 at about 3-4 psi. The reason is if you put in other gases your mixed gas pressure will be too high and you can't move in a flexible suit. If you go too low you are in trouble too.

My company makes use of quite a lot of helium. We produce instrumentation for materials science research. Our product line has shifted to systems with built in helium recovery because the cost of helium is now high enough for research facilities to demand it. I'd argue that the helium shortage is quite real.